Bugbear announces the Early Access to their Next Car Game offered through
Steam and the
Next Car Game website surpassed $1 million
in sales in its first week of availability (there's also a free tech demo of the
game available for those who
sign up for their
newsletter). They point out what a triumph this is for the demolition game
which many publishers thought would crash and burn:

This is an amazing
success for a racing game, especially considering our tough road to the
success. Along the way we pitched the game to numerous publishers in the hopes
that the game would eventually get released. Unfortunately we receive the same
response all over again Ė there were no market for a game like ours. Come on,
who would want to race and crash with such old beaters? Well, we would!
Because of that we didnít give up, but instead chose to seek crowd-funding on
Kickstarter. However, we experienced another setback when our Kickstarter
campaign didnít reach the goal we were aiming for.

However, we still believed in the game, and we decided to release a playable
technology sneak peek. We were literally awe-struck by the great response the
sneak peek received. The pre-order sales skyrocketed, and we reached and
actually topped our original Kickstarter funding goal in just week! And
most importantly: the success showed us that the players believed in the
game.

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Riker wrote on Jan 30, 2014, 15:49:That's a pretty cool story. It must've been crushing to fail to get picked up by a publisher and then fail to get funded on Kickstarter. Good for them.

The problem with the kickstarter is they held back the 'real demo' once the real demo leaked via torrent (the pre-order preview). Then everyone got on board. So they kinda failed themselves unfortunately when they tried to kickstart.

They released a free tech demo that is pretty much the same as the Kickstarter one. AFAIK the only difference is that the free one lacked AI cars. Perhaps the physics gun too? The Kickstarter one is better but there's no need to go torrenting it.

Maybe this was added towards the end of the Kickstart. When I bought, I got a Steam key and could download the Early Access demo (laps, destruction derby) from Steam even though it wasn't on the Steam store at the time. I also got the extended tech demo from their site.